[A] stunning debut. . . . Izzy’s tale is strange and wild, but it’s also one that illuminates our national obsession with new highs, and new heights.
Kirkus Reviews
...composed in weird and luminous prose... interrogates powerful ambivalence about religion and explores the possibilities of transcendence.
Starred Review - Booklist
True Grit meets Philip K. Dick as Wheeler expertly limns his heroine’s space-age travels in prose that skitters between lyrical and vernacular and sticks the landing.
Paul Wilner - ALTA
[The High Heaven] has got me rethinking my stake in the universe. . . . Even when Izzy’s journey descends into dark territories, Wheeler . . . writes like he’s having a blast
Rien Fertel - The New Orleans Times-Picayune
An
Best Novel of 2025
In a novel of cosmic proportions like Wheeler’s, it is striking just how carefully and beautifully the book attends to the out-of-the-way places that feature in it. . . . If there’s one message Wheeler’s novel brings into sharp focus, it’s this: We belong here, with and for each other.
Joel Pickney - Defector
With shimmering intelligence and innovative grace, The High Heaven is a prismatic debut that fuses earthbound struggle and cosmic wonder. Joshua Wheeler has unleashed a wildly entertaining, daringly original, genre-blending vision.
Kimberly King Parsons
author of We Were the Universe
An astonishing novel, a tour de force.
Not since Lee K. Abbott has a writer heard the music of the hinterlands so keenly and put it on paper with such exuberance, such glee, such grace. Joshua Wheeler’s talent is searing.
Claire Vaye Watkins
author of Gold, Fame, Citrus
The High Heaven is Dickens dropping acid in the desert of 1960s New Mexico, having visions of outer space and America that may be of the past, present, or future, but that, under the spell of Joshua Wheeler’s poetic sentences, fuse into an act of supreme imagination.
Fernando A. Flores
author of Brother Brontë
The High Heaven contains the gritty strangeness of New Mexico and Texas and the gothic allure of New Orleans, full of struggle, despair, and hope. Joshua Wheeler writes with great precision and wild, exceptional vision.